Friday, May 18, 2018

Good to Be Back!

Harmony on the Set!

Following the publication of Dreams Given Form in the fall, I just had to back off of this blog for a while. It was an amazing year at my day job, as I worked on a major restructuring of my Public Speaking class - with help from generous colleagues, I took the leap and went from "flipping" the classroom to "gaming" the classroom. I've had to make adjustments on the fly, of course (any revamp requires flexibility to find the proper balance), but the initial results are heartening. I was goaded into agreeing to participate in a sprint triathlon at the beginning of June (so I've got about two weeks of training time left) and that's taken a considerable amount of time and energy.

I won't even try to catch up on movies and TV that I've immersed myself in over the last eight months. But I will say that The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is well worth your time, I found myself wondering if The Good Place will become a supplement to philosophy and ethics classes, Black Panther justly took the world by storm, and I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the current season of The Americans yet. (Honestly, that show is beginning to seem prescient.)

Also on my list - Legion and The Handmaid's Tale.
I'm also preparing for the upcoming Whedon conference - this is the 8th Slayage and pulls attendees from across the country as well as from Europe and beyond. The last one was held in 2016 in London, and I missed it (due to the aforementioned Dreams Given Form). This one is at the University of North Alabama in Florence, AL. I'm excited to attend. My presentation is more of a roundtable this time with several other scholars with diverse points of view. We'll be arguing over the revelation that Whedon gaslit us and the impact it has when a creator turns out to have feet of clay, if not outright mud. (Then again, after some of the thoroughly icky revelations of the #MeToo movement, Whedon seems like a garden-variety jerk, rather than a predatory monster.) Plenty of creators aren't particularly enlightened human beings - how does it affect the relationship with the art? It's going to be an interesting session.

But I've been missing this blog. So I'm back! My summer film class begins on Monday and I'm sure I'll include some material here about their films, along with other bits that catch my fancy.

Quick lesson - superhero movies are a particular sub-genre of the "action/adventure" movie category. They are also notoriously ...

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Look, I'm flattered if you read something here and like it enough to want to want to rip it off. Or even if you dislike it enough to want to rip it apart. In either case, the content of this blog is mine - I'm responsible for it and you are not to use it without first obtaining permission from me.

Copyright. It's not just a good idea. It's the law.

It really is - see Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution.

K. Dale Koontz

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Who?

K. Dale Koontz may have watched too much television as a child. She learned to count via Sesame Street and first learned that genres could cross-pollinate through M*A*S*H. When she discovered Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the die was cast. In 2008, McFarland published her book Faith and Choice in the Work of Joss Whedon which focused on themes such as redemption, choice, and consequences in Whedon's work up to that point. (She's fairly sure Volume 2 could be written to include Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, and The Avengers.) She is a founding member of the Whedon Studies Association (a great group of people, but don't mention Twilight. Just sayin'). She has presented original work on the Rossum Corporation in Dollhouse, Kitty Pryde, and Japanese anime. In 2014, she and co-author Ensley F. Guffey worked with ECW Press to publish the critically-acclaimed Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad. Her most recent project was to team again with Ensley and ECW to publish A Dream Given Form, which is the only guide to all the canonical works in the Babylon 5 universe. That book is currently available for preorder and will be released in September of 2017. Dale is available for speaking engagements and only occasionally uses puppets in her presentations.

What?

I have long been interested in storytelling - how we do it, why we do it, and what happens when we mix things up. This interest might be the result of being born and raised in the American South, a region that has long celebrated the involved story over the quick answer. Television - the good stuff, anyway - does this brilliantly. Far from being film's red-headed tacky cousin, good TV lets characters and relationships build slowly and often mixes up genres, so horror is next door to humor and fantasy rubs shoulders with procedurals. This blog focuses on both the "good stuff" being broadcast that catches my fancy (with a special emphasis on Babylon 5, since that's the book that's in the process of being written right now) as well as film. The films are usually new releases being watched for TV19's weekly Meet Me at the Movies, although I reserve the right to veer off into classics and under-appreciated gems as well. Older posts cover what my introduction to film class was up to - currently, I'm not teaching that course, but who knows what the future may hold.